Mark Caso Discovers Life as a Turtle Isn’t Always So Ultra-Cool

“We’re basically four blind Turtles walking around tripping over each other,” Mark Caso jokes.

But Caso found starring as the ultra-cool tortoise Leonardo in the new action-comedy “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze” was no laughing matter.

“When you are in the Turtle suit,” he says, “you are so sensorially deprived you lose awareness of time, and you don’t see anything . You are blind in there. You can’t feel anything because your body is covered with 100% latex.”

And it also was unbearably hot. “We filmed this in North Carolina and it was about 97 degrees. They tried to make a cooling system, but it kept malfunctioning the computers that made the faces and eyes work.”

It’s a miracle, though, Caso is even in “Ninja Turtles.” Ten years ago when he was 18, he broke the fifth and sixth vertebrae in his neck in a gymnastic accident at UCLA.

“I had residual paralysis in my arms and triceps,” he says. “But everything came back after they fused my neck vertebrae.”

Still, the road to recovery was long and painful. Caso was in traction for several months at UCLA Medical Center. “I had to go through extensive physical therapy. It was really a tough, tough thing. I was just a freshman at UCLA when this happened to me. It was really traumatic for me.”

The accident, though, made him more dependent. “You are thrust into reality quickly when you break your neck. Things really changed--relationships, values and even how I looked at the world.”

Caso eventually returned to gymnastics. “I couldn’t just end it the way it ended. I needed to compete one more time and say, ‘Hey, I am done.’ So I went back and competed one more time and qualified for the U.S. National team. I thought, ‘It wasn’t suppose to happen this way.’ I blew everybody away.”